Projects

The main goal of this project is reducing food waste
in school canteens by measuring how much food each student leaves on the
tray at every meal and by generating awareness on food waste among the students.

The project has the goal of sharing, consolidating, and improving current practices to build software products for emerging markets, taking into account different constraints, such as time-to-market, value for users, and maintainability. The project is implemented through the exchange of experiences (of the partners and of the SMEs collaborating with the partners), training of students on the methodological aspects, and experimentation.

The Hour of Code is a global movement reaching over 100 million students in more than 180 countries.
It started as a one-hour introduction to computer science, designed to demystify "code", to show that anybody can learn the basics, and to broaden participation in the field of computer science. It has since become a worldwide effort to celebrate computer science, starting with 1-hour coding activities but expanding to all sorts of community efforts.

We have been organizing Hour of Code from 2015 in different events and in different venues. Here is a list of the most relevant ones:

The Maputo Living Lab (MLL) aims at applying the open innovation
paradigm of Living Labs by involving the local community as a
source for project ideas and as end-user group for the Living
Lab's products.

Furthermore, being located in a developing region,
MLL will have the goal of fostering local development by working
as a start-up incubator to promote local entrepreneurship, helping
the execution of innovative projects that can contribute to the
improvement of the quality of life in Mozambique.

The implementation of ICT projects in developmental contexts is a
growing phenomenon. It presents interesting social and technical
challenges.

Understanding of lessons learnt and best practices
under extreme conditions such as the ones found on the African
continent can provide valuable insights for ICT deployment in
developed countries.

At the same time, the experience in use cases
and technical know-how of developed countries can help regions
such as Sub-Saharan Africa in harnessing the full potential of ICT
for social and economic development.

The project, financed by UTICT (the Technical Unit for the Implementation of e-Government in Mozambique) run in 2009 and was carried out in collaboration with the University of Trento and CREATE-NET.

The goal had the goal of defining an interoperability framework for the e-Government systems of Mozambique and defining an implementation plan to carry out the transition. The definition of the framework presented some interesting challenges due to the need of taking into account some specific requirements typical of a fast-growing, developing country, among which we mention:

The centralized, top-down approach typically associated to any interoperability framework had to be reconciled with the fast, decentralized, and loosely controlled development of IT solutions going on in Mozambique

the standardization process, typically comprising the different technical layers to guarantee proper interoperability of the IT systems, had to be "lifted" at the software management and development level, to simplify longer-term maintainability of the IT solutions integration of manual and automated processes had to be taken into account the framework had to be scalable and flexible in order to make its adoption sustainable in the longer term.

Empowering citizens in making Governments more accountable and transparent in the services they provide has gained more attention in the last few years both in the developing and in the developed world. At the basis of any such exercise, information and data collection activities play an important role.

SAMO stands for "Social Accountability in Mozambique" and the project, conducted in collaboration with the Ministry of Education of Mozambique, the World Bank and the Maputo Living Lab had the goal of collecting data about various procurement indicators of primary schools in the Moamba district, a rural area of Mozambique.

For this purpose we developed a data collection platform and a mobile application to conduct field work and collected 677 interviews.